The Tokyo Zodiac Murders

OK, this was really quite a bit of good fun. According to the afterword by the publishers at the end, this style of mystery is under the subgenre called “honkaku”, which is much more interested in “pure” mysteries without any social criticism. Readers are given all the clues they need to solve the mystery before the end of the book, so there's perhaps less focus on the personalities and backstories of the characters and more emphasis on the actual puzzle.

Indeed, you really do feel like this is a logic puzzle in the form of a novel. Things are laid out for you right from the prologue itself. It's got a sort of narrative thread, but it's really just our two main characters, Kiyoshi and Kazumi, discussing with each other and therefore infodumping every little hint and detail of the puzzle to the reader. It's not exactly a crime-solving journey that the reader is invited on, it's really the author giving you the puzzle pieces and telling you to try solving it yourself.

It takes a while to get used to but I found it pretty fun. Some of the dialogue may seem a bit stilted but I chalk it to translation. I find that East Asian languages inevitably lose a lot of colour and nuance when translated to English, and it results in slightly strange-sounding dialogue sometimes which I don't really mind. Plus, this book was published 40 years ago so I'm sure a lot of the terminology, proverbs, and slang used here is already long outdated.

I didn't quite solve the murder before the last Act, but I'm slightly happy to say that I did guess it just before it was revealed in the narrative, with the final clues that Kiyoshi threw down before he went ahead with the full explanation. The solution was fairly ingenious, but I thought the backstory was more mundane than we might've expected, although I usually find that to be the case for murder stories with the most sensational premises, what with all these astrology elements and bizarre dismemberments.

I'd definitely read more of Soji Shimada's books.